TrickstaPriest

I should add that Clinton is not the only person who'd want Epstein out. Trump and he were very close associates after all... since Trump was a close part of the Clinton circle until he ran for President. All major parties probably wanted him out of the picture. I'm very disappointed it happened.

Do you think the government, or the Republican party in specific, is unable to finance the protection of the President?

I mean, an uprising (or literally a call to violence) concerns me, but this is the product of overwhelming decades of constant unopposed propaganda targeting religious or isolated people. It seems like the internet is beginning to convert and break those pockets up (to me, the evidence of global warming is damning enough on those propagandist sources that it's brutally cutting off a generation from this indoctrinated parentage). The frantic pushing is a measure of desperation because their kids are realizing how long they've been conned. This isn't to say they are 'blue', but they have every reason to resent everything these people stand for. And I will not hesitate to remind them of that. If we had more time, I'd advocate for a gentler approach... but we've already stalled on several important things for literally decades. None of my opinion even includes automation or economic forces, just environmental ones.

Couldn't have happened to a better President. ... Okay but seriously. I hope there's enough to hammer nails in 5 inches long. It might be the only way to counteract the chicanery of the congressmen that's been going on, and I do not wish to give them any leeway at all.

These are the ones that I find particularly notable, specifically. I wonder how much information there is available on #4.

It's kind of petty and absurd. Which sounds exactly like our politicians and congress.

Indeed. And I appreciate any effort put into research and references.

Because no one shared it here yet: It gets fairly technical at times.

This and his twitter are the whole grounds of why I find people's evasions and equivocations of him and others to be contemptible. We have unfettered access to his thoughts and words, and his clear indications of his competency. Every time I hear someone I know say "oh that's just slandering him" I have to point to the two greatest indicators we have in modern history that he's a complete mess. The latest debacles of his foreign policy behavior is of no surprise to me. I would disagree because they would find a way around any such agreement.

I was just going to share this and ask what people thought of the fallout (or how accurate this guy's information is). It's a 'beau' video on the fallout of the Turkey/Kurd situation. Pretty hyperbolic, but I can stand to see that he is upset. So the real question is... how accurate is that read on what's happened so far? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDRSXmd9LAQ

This is a highly relevant thread for me, as I've been contemplating running a supers urban fantasy game...

I mean, taxes are a primary source of power for a government. The more taxes they collect, the more power they have over their people. (Those taxes are then used to pay military forces... though similarly, you can use one to get the other...) The concern a lot of people have is whether you can control a government handling that kind of money... without them walking off with it. On the other hand, automation is going to basically remove the need to pay people to do work, which is a whole other power system that's going to collapse the power dynamics of a democratic country so...

Ditto. It's why I try and keep my most stringent opinions towards scientific knowledge...

This though I wholly agree with >_>

Sure, but oversimplifying the problem is going to have serious consequences. In this case, we more or less deliberately set them up to be quashed by their enemies, and will be creating more terrorist caliphates specifically targeting us in the future because of this. Getting out is a priority, but we could have established this through one of our other partners... in advance. I'd like to be corrected on this, because it really seems like we just tossed it into the air and shouted "catch!"

It was this, in particular, that was illuminating to me.

Thanks for the 'hearts', ScottishFox It's all a damned mess.

I'm sympathetic to wanting to stop involvement over there. I plainly wish international politics was that simple. But I have to disagree. This action has basically established the groundwork there for creating a new ISIS. It's already happened, just with the Kurdish forces being bombed by Turkish ones. I'm not sure anything we do going forwards is going to fix that. The only way that might be prevented is if all of the Kurdish forces, and all forces and countries sympathetic to them, happen to get completely wiped out. Yes, getting involved in that part of the world was greedy and stupid. But simply dropping it all onto the floor isn't actually going to address the problem of how we created that mess to begin with. It's literally the whole criticism of how we trained Osama bin Laden and created ISIS playing over again in real time. We are now possibly watching it happen, and arguing over whether we should care that it's happening. And I'm sure the MIC wants those profits now, but they are probably going to collect huge in the future by us perpetually de-stabilizing that region. In the same ways as always. What should have been the right move? Probably warning Kurdish forces that this was going to happen, and literally not giving Turkey permission to bomb them overnight. What's the right move from here? Right now, who the heck knows...

Actually thought about this not long ago, and more or less came to the same conclusion. If you want to drive down costs for a field, you a) redevelop how people are trained for that field, and b) make sure competition is actually going on in that field. The problem is that health care is tricky, as the concept of competition in healthcare is a loose concept at best. If quality was high across the board, and we automatically cover emergency care, maybe...

It wouldn't hurt for someone to do an analysis of what our government has done with its money over the last x (50?) years, and what places money has disappeared from.

I sort of disagree on the assessments of the news channels. What matters is what of the news stations people actually watch, and what information they take away from it. I know a lot of people watch Fox News as their primary source of information. A lot of people. And while The Blaze is where you would get the "right leaning crazies", most of those crazies have been a part of Fox News for an incredible amount of time, and formed the basis of knowledge and perspective for multiple generations of Americans. It's literally why climate change is so difficult to convince people of in this country. To have the majority of the population think this way, and to have a party speak that way, appears to be a unique phenomenon (in modern societies) to America, and you can lay that almost entirely on Fox News and the radio show people that branch off of it (and yet remain a part of it). Climate change denial is only one belief that this happens with, but is a perfect example of how this works: many people watch Fox, that information is disseminated across generations of people and decades of time, and if they were to change their tune about climate change tomorrow people would simply leave Fox, and watch the Blaze instead. The fact that the "Democratic Party" has "caught on" to this kind of meme-like information control does not please me in the slightest, and that will form a new foundation of problems that we are starting to see, but it's nowhere as established, powerful, or yet as dangerous as what has gone on in the past. And if we want to prevent that from happening, pushing candidates that are not abusing that information and not part of that system is the best way I know of to overturn that power base.

To reiterate this, look at how often he accuses 'the media', or whoever, without saying -who-. Been looking at this at how he appeals to people's hate in particular, essentially speaking to all their anger and hate without ever saying who or what they are supposed to be hating... because it's an adlib. It's 'fill in the blank' on purpose, both as a defensive mechanism and way to make it personal without trying. For example, look at horoscopes.

This is what I keep on trying to tell people. My 'dislike' of Trump is founded on nothing to do with media, and everything to do with how he conducts himself in the public venue (Twitter especially) and how even the most power-hungry politicians can't work with him. He's impossible to work with unless you are slavishly devoted to him. Everything else is believable only because he's already established himself (with his own words, and his own constant firings) as completely untenable.

I don't agree. But I think the real culprit here is the radio shows and "news" organizations that were left to prey on them for literally half a century.

It bothers me that we have a government that's not even bothering to try to understand what's legally passable or not. On the finer points, if not the broad ones.